Sunday, January 13, 2008

Along the way while writing Epy, I've noticed some things about Javascript (a language I once considered perfectly reasonable) that are in serious need of a revamp (at least at the time of writing this). Here are just a few of the (many) issues I have with Javascript:

Namespaces. In the world of most Javascript, everything is global or function-scope, there seems to be no use of namespace or module-style development at all. It's possible to simulate namespaces by wrapping entire modules in an object definition, but this is usually too much of a hassle for practicality.

Objects. Javascript's object system is, well, crap. Sure, it's ad-hoc like Python, but it has no formal way of creating simple constructors. You can use the "this" object in a function, or create a new instance of "Object" to append methods to, but there are no standards for constructing an object.

Objects do not support destructors. Many might argue that a memory-safe language like Js doesn't need them, but destructors have more use than freeing memory. They serve a very useful purpose in a lot of OO designs, memory-safe or not.

Javascript does not support associative arrays! You can use the "Array" object, or even the "Object" object to assign associative values to using the index operators, but this is deceiving... Any time you use "obj['index'] = something" you could replace it with "obj.index = something" which causes major problems with naming collisions. This style of object/hashtable is bad, there should be a clear distinction between the two.

Javascript is not cross-browser compatible... Don't get me started...

Yet Javascript remains at the heart of our internet! Projects like Epy could help to solve some of these problems by abstracting away the issues allowing you to develop your client-side scripting in a more pleasant syntax (such as Python). But maybe someday we'll just use another language all-together :)